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Tag: federal student aid

Over at the New America Foundation’s “Higher Ed Watch” blog, Stephen Burd purports to know “the truth behind Senate Republican’s boycott of the Harkin hearing.” And what is that truth? Republicans are trying to “discredit an investigation that has revealed just how much damage their efforts to deregulate the industry over the past decade have caused both students and taxpayers.”

Really?

Okay, it is possible that Republicans are trying to save themselves some sort of blame or embarrasment – I can’t read their minds – but if so they’ve done a terrible job. Every time Harkin holds one of his hearings the bulk of the mediacoverage treats it like it has revealed shocking abuse by the entire for-profit sector. And don’t forget the damage done by the now-discredited – at least for those wonks who have followed it – GAO “secret shopper” report that was baised against for-profits enough on its own, but Sen. Harkin abused even beyond what the GAO wrote was reasonable. So Harkin has defintiely gotten his message across, and he certainly hasn’t hidden past Republican efforts to reduce regulatory burdens on for-profit schools.

The fact remains, however, that the whole Ivory Tower – every floor and staircase – is loaded down with luxurious but crushing waste, and the crumbling foundations are being propped up with huge amounts of taxpayer dough and student debt. Not addessing that, as the boycotting Senators have stated, is what has been blaringly wrong with Harkin’s crusade. (Not that I think either party is likely to do what needs to be done: phasing out federal student aid.)

So absolutely, let’s stop forcing taxpayers to prop up the for-profit part of the tower. But let’s also stop pretending that that part isn’t just one rotten level in a much bigger, buckling edifice.

The hotly anticipated – and dreaded – “gainful employment” regulations aimed at for-profit colleges were released this morning, and based on media reports the big news is that they are a little more lenient than originally expected. Most importantly, schools that fail to meet debt-to-income and debt-repayment requirements will not be cut off from federal student aid – the financial crack on which almost every college and university depends – until 2015.

That’s the big news, at least as reported. But it isn’t the important story.

The real story remains that the Obama administration, and at least the education leadership in the Senate, continues to divert the public’s eye towards for-profit schools when the entire higher education system is a waste-engorged, parasitic mess.

Yes, for-profit schools have low program completion rates, but the overall six-year completion rate for four-year programs is just around 57 percent. And yes, for-profit schools leave many students with big debt, but the average debt for all four-year undergraduate students who have taken loans is around $24,000. And yes, students at for-profit institutions draw heavily on the public treasury to pay for the studies they don’t complete, but higher education overall is a gigantic leech feeding off taxpayers, taking in hundreds of billions of dollars every year from alllevels of government. And it is ever-growing aid to students from vote-hungry federal politicians that is likely the most potent force enabling rampant price inflation and massive college overconsumption. After all, the price becomes a lot less important – and extravagances more enticing – when someone else is footing much of the bill.

Now that these rules have been published, let’s move on to what really needs to happen: Phasing out government subsidies for the entire draining Ivory Tower.

The most recent, comprehensive Pew higher education survey has gotten a lot of coverage for its findings on how important the public thinks college is, its financial payoff for grads, etc. For some reason, though, by far the most interesting statistic in the report has gotten roughly zero play, either from Pew itself or media coverage of the report: “Among all college graduates, 33% say they are in a job that does not require a college degree.”

Wait. One-third of all college graduates are in jobs that don’t call for a college education? So one-third of all college degrees are quite possibly total economic wastes? (To be fair, no doubt some of those grads are looking for jobs requiring a degree, mitigating this somewhat. On the flip side, many jobs probably require a degree without actually requiring college-level skills, counterbalancing that.)

In light of this, can someone please tell me why President Obama wants the United States to lead the world in the precentage of its population with a college degree by 2020? And please, explain why Washington furnished over $113 billion in student aid in the 2009-10 academic year? I’d really like to know.

If you ever want to see how federal student aid is used for political gain, look no further than the report on the American Opportunity Tax Credit released today by the U.S. Treasury Department. The accolade-begging for the President begins right on the cover page:

The President created the American Opportunity Tax Credit (AOTC) as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which he signed into law in February 2009. For tax years 2009 and 2010, the new law allows families with tuition expenses to receive a tax credit of up to $2,500 per student, and up to $1,000 per year of this amount is refundable. If the AOTC is made permanent, as proposed in the President’s FY 2011 Budget, a student could receive a credit up to $10,000 over four years.

The President, of course, doesn’t create these things, the legislative branch does. But the Prez, apparently, wants the credit for the credits. A White House event scheduled for today suggests why: It appears that the President will be using the report, as well as his proposal to extend the AOTC, to curry favor with college students, a potentially large voting bloc.

The content of the report, unfortunately, is just as bad as its PR use, going on and on about how much free money the credit offers for college, and breaking down the benefits so every type of filer can see how he or she might benefit. Meanwhile, there’s hardly amention of the AOTC’s cost – something in which you’d think the Treasury Department would be at least a little interested. But, to be fair, I’m not just talking about the obvious cost to taxpayers who will sooner or later have to foot the bill for this Santa Claus program. Arguably the even bigger cost is that expanding federal aid like this ultimately just enables colleges to raise their prices and capture the money, making it a major, self-defeating source of fuel for rampant tuition inflation.

So the AOTC will do little or nothing to make college more affordable in the long-run. It will, though, make colleges and their employeesbetter off, and create the powerful illusion that Washington politicians – especially, in this case, the President – are doing their best to make college affordable for all. And that, as pure-PR reports like this one strongly suggest, is likely the primary goal.

Great column on the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act by Tim Carney in today’s Washington Examiner. He hits the major points — SAFRA hardly threatens a sudden federal takeover of student lending, but also promises anything but “fiscal reponsibility” — while adding a critical warning: the whole stinkin’ bill could be tacked onto health care reconciliation.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declaring that it’s time to end the Federal Family Education Loan program (FFEL) which subsidizes banks and insulates them against almost all lending risk. Duncan wants to eliminate the “middle man” and have the vast majority of student loans come directly from Uncle Sam, a goal central to the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA).

Incongruously, after ripping the poor middle people, Duncan explains that they should actually stay firmly attached to federal funds as loan servicers. He then goes on to applaud as an incredible money-saver going to all direct lending.

Fortunately, several astute readers – as well as yours truly – saw right through Duncan’s heap of contradictions and dissembling, and the WSJ has printed numerous letters speaking the truth about student lending and SAFRA.

The Pope Center’s George Leef – who has done great higher-education work with Cato – leads things off with a letter pointing out all the perverse incentives and painful unintended consequences emanating from federal student aid. I bookend that by attacking the most aggravating of all SAFRA-related lies: that the bill would provide $10 billion for deficit reduction. Read any CBO estimate for SAFRA and you’ll see that that is just a bald-faced lie.

Of course, if they didn’t have lies, our student-lending overlords wouldn’t have much to say at all. Which is one of many reasons that the feds should get out of education – including student aid – altogether.

This morning I attended a federal student aid event at the New America Foundation. The big topic? Not the effect of aid on out-of-control college prices, by far the most important concern from the contexts of economic growth, affordability, fairness to taxpayers, etc. No, it was the Obama Administration’s “bold” (NAF’s word) proposal to kill the federal guaranteed student loan program and do all lending directly from Washington. It was just the kind of debate folks in DC love, one that sounds really important but leaves the government-created problem almost totally untouched.

Here’s the critical reality that was completely ignored: taxpayer-furnished financial aid – whether coming directly from DC or delivered by “private” institutions completely backed by DC – appears to be a very big enabler of rampant tuition inflation. Quite simply, as I lay out in the most recent Cato Handbook for Policy, when government ensures that customers can pay more, students demand more and colleges raise prices.

Of course, the argument that aid drives prices is not without its critics, but they’ve got a tough case to make both in terms of economic theory and college cost reality. In Washington, however, this isn’t even being discussed. In DC, it’s all about the deck chairs and nothing about the sinking ship. But then, as we’ve learned oh-so-clearly over the last several months, politicians gain little from averting disasters they’ve helped cause, and lots from handing out life jackets.

Fortunately, Cato is here to remind politicians about the important stuff, not just to bicker over which special interest gets the biggest tax-dollar windfall. On April 7 we will address the fundamental problems with student aid, hosting a Capitol Hill Briefing on the effects not just of switching from guaranteed lending to direct lending, but of all federal student aid. It’ll be just the kind of discussion Washington so desperately needs but so rarely has.